The rise in drone adoption in Nigeria over the past year is reflecting a trend of accelerating interest in multiple sectors across Africa.
US drone maker Zipline and the Nigerian government announced a deal last week at the UN General Assembly that will see the company assume a central role in moving medical products including blood, medicines, and vaccines around the country. The partnership will “raise the quality of healthcare services available to all Nigerians,” Nigeria’s Health Minister Ali Pate said in a statement.
The deal comes two years after Zipline started a pilot in Nigeria’s northwestern state of Kaduna. A key part of the project is raising money to set up and staff multiple hubs with facilities for drone operations, including warehouses, and take-off and landing areas. Each hub will serve communities within a 38,000 sq km radius, Caitlin Burton, Zipline’s Senior Vice President for partnerships, told Semafor Africa. Gavi, the vaccine alliance, and the Elton John AIDS Foundation, have signed up as seed funders. Burton estimated the project would need to raise “millions of dollars.”
It is the latest mark in a nascent sector. In April, Terrahaptix, a startup in Nigeria’s capital Abuja, opened a 15,000 sq ft factory to begin producing drones. It is in the process of setting up a second plant in another West African country.
Nathan Nwachukwu, one of Terrahaptix’s two co-founders who are both aged 21, said the startup’s drones and operating software are mostly made in-house and that they have banked “over $1 million in revenue” from commercial customers in the oil, mining and agriculture industries in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya. The companies that buy their drones use them mainly as part of their security hardware, he said.
“The only things we do not build are the sensors and cameras,” Nwachukwu told Semafor Africa. The startup pulled back from an initial focus on making military drones to avoid connections with violent conflicts, he said.
Source link : https://www.semafor.com/article/10/03/2024/drones-mainstream-across-africa
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Publish date : 2024-10-03 13:31:00
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